Burnside Rare Books

La Nuit [Night]

Wiesel, Elie

Paris: Les Editions De Minuit, 1958.

First French edition, preceding the first English edition. 178, [1] pp., text in French. Bound in publisher's printed wraps. Near Fine with lean to spine, and light toning and scattered foxing to covers and contents. Rare, particularly in this condition. Abramowitz A2.

Elie Wiesel, liberated from Buchenwald at the age of sixteen, waited ten years to write his testimony. His first effort was in Yiddish, a 253-page memoir intended for a Jewish audience and published in 1956 by the Central Union of Polish Jews in Argentina. To get the book published in France, Wiesel’s postwar home, he needed to cut it down. Most publishers rejected even the shortened version, but the novelist Francois Mauriac helped Wiesel get his book into the hands of Les Editions de Minuit, a publishing firm founded during the French Resistance.

Wiesel’s searing account of his time at Auschwitz and Buchenwald came out in 1958 and sold poorly, though it did capture the attention of reviewers. Holocaust literature was not popular, and American publishers proved equally reluctant to publish the book in English. Wang & Hill finally accepted the manuscript and brought out Night in 1960, with the same result: good reviews, poor sales.

The 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Israeli-Arab wars that followed, and the changing attitudes of a younger generation renewed public interest in Elie Wiesel’s memoir. By the end of the twentieth century, Night was a standard high school and college text, and remains so today. “The act of writing is for me,” Wiesel said, “often nothing more than the secret of conscious desire to carve words on a tombstone to the memory of all those I loved and who, before I could tell them I loved them, went away.” He succeeded in creating a moving, dignified, and timeless memorial in Night. Item #140949023

Price: $6,000